Poultry News June/July 2024

As we have perused the internet over the last year for this new Poultry News column, we have been delighted to see so many new counties and municipalities allow backyard poultry into suburban and urban places.  Sometimes they limit the flock to only females and other times the cap the group to four to ten. What we have found from reading over the public board meetings is that gifting a neighbor with a few eggs every once in a while, can go a long way.

In Essex Junction, VT Jason Struthers had state permission to grow cannabis and raise ducks in his backyard. He initially wanted the ducks for meat, but then started utilizing them in a permaculture system.  After neighbor complaints of noise, smoke, and odor the city ruled that he could continue to grow cannabis but had to get rid of his ducks. Instead of gifting eggs to his neighbors, he may have gotten further with gifting his other commodity to mellow out his neighbors’ opinions on backyard poultry.

Chicken Litter Pollution Lawsuits

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson started a lawsuit 20 years ago against poultry companies that polluted the eastern waterways including the Illinois River. The poultry companies blamed the chicken farmers for the pollution in private, while publicly they said they wanted to protect the small farmers. Most of the poultry industry in eastern Oklahoma is made up of several thousand birds, with 100,000 chickens producing 750 tons of litter a year.

Now state lawmakers have proposed a bill to remove liability from companies in the future, giving them a “license to pollute,” according to environmentalists Matt Wright, chairman of the Conservation Coalition of Oklahoma.

Wright says the law is worded so that poultry farm operators would not be held liable if they pollute as long as they had a plan not to pollute. He told The Oklahoman that he couldn’t think of another industry that had this type of immunity.  “If an oil and gas company had a spill but said they at least had a plan that tried to avoid the spill, they can still be held liable.”

According to The Oklahoman in 2005 Edmondson sued several poultry companies, including Tyson Foods, Cargill, Cal-Maine Foods and Simmons Foods, for causing increased levels of phosphorus, E. coli and nitrogen in the Illinois River Watershed. While the state won, just last year, the case is still unresolved due to a court-ordered meditation.

Historically the poultry manure was utilized locally, but runoff into waterways caused increased filtration costs for dozens of towns who  used the Illinois River Watershed for drinking water. Now some of the poultry manure is shipped to other states as fertilizer, but the phosphorus levels still remain above the state standards.

Southeast Asian Wash Raw Poultry

According to an April 2024 article in Food Control, most participants in Southeast Asian countries washed raw poultry before cooking. However, this is not recommended as this practice increases risks of cross contamination with foodborne pathogens. From the over 2,000 participants surveyed in the eight Southeast Asian countries, 96%  reported that they washed raw poultry at home. According to the paper, the main reasons for washing raw poultry were to remove dirt, slime, blood or feathers and the act of washing makes them feel safer. However, observational studies reveal multiple cross contamination pathways occur while washing raw poultry. The practice is passed down in culture, as consumers prefer freshly butchered birds, which are often sourced at wet markets. The paper says a targeted food safety message and educational campaign suited to local cultural differenced should be conducted including the importance of hand hygiene and the cleaning of the kitchen sink and surrounding areas with soap.

Human Chicken Relationships

Jenny Mace, of the University of Winchester and colleague Andrew Knight, Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics, and Founding Director of the Centre for Animal Welfare, at the University of Winchester embarked to find out more of the human-chicken relationship in a 2,000+ survey. Results were published in Animals an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal.

Participants included mostly chicken-oriented Facebook groups and other chicken organizations mostly in the UK.

Overall participants reported “personal” relationships to their chickens with 90 percent saying they would never kill their chickens for consumption.  “Preventing commercial chickens from going to slaughter” was a key motive for chicken care by 56.1 percent of respondents, with 69.6 percent of respondents stating they cared for ex-commercial chickens. In open interviews phrases like “lower pet status”, “pets with benefits”, and “productive backyard pets” were used.

How do you think U.S. attitudes to backyard poultry compare or differ? We love the idea of “pets with benefits”!